Auernheimer, 24, was arrested in
his home late Tuesday when police raided it. At this point its
unknown whether the raid was triggered by AT&T or was unrelated
to the iPad drama. AT&T sent
an apology to customers writing that it was investigating
the "malicious" "attack" by "hackers",
and has since wrote that it is cooperating with the FBI in the
inquiry.

What is clear was that a large amount of controlled
substances, including cocaine, LSD and ecstasy, were found in
Auernheimer's house.

For now Auernheimer is in jail awaiting
multiple criminal possession charges. He is currently
incarcerated at Washington Country Detention Center in Fayetteville,
Arkansas.

That’s
one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that AT&T’s
security malfeasance exposed the private user details of over a
hundred thousand customers, and are now busy hunting down and
vilifying the benign group of security activists who alerted them to
the problem before less well-meaning hacker groups could exploit the
data.

While
Auernheimer’s arrest for drug charges is obviously warranted by the
letter of the law, it’s hard to escape the fact that the Feds
shouldn’t have even been at his house. Goatse did both the public
and AT&T a service by publicizing a dangerous security
vulnerability before it could be maliciously exploited. They didn’t
publish the exploit until AT&T had closed the hole. They insisted
that any published customer records had the personal information
removed first.

Indeed
if the raid ends up being based on the iPad investigation, it may end
up being ruled invalid, considering no charges have been filed in
that investigation.

The Goatse Security
researchers point out that they went to no elaborate means to obtain
the information. AT&T's website freely provided email
addresses to requests with spoofed iPad headers containing an ICC-ID
number. Spoofing is by no means illegal -- most cell phones do
it to change between mobile version of sites and the full version.
And all Goatse Security did was guess numbers.

They state that
they felt compelled to leak the information after Apple and AT&T
still haven't fixed a gaping
Safari hole on the iPad. They revealed that hole way
back in March, and nothing has been done. The group says that
if they did not approach the media with the massive amount of emails
they gathered, the company would have done nothing and would continue
to endanger its customers.